Centenary of Pierrot Lunaire

Tiger wrote:

...I was meditating on dodecaphony.

A century has passed by now... what do you think?

As I once wrote, dodecaphony is proof of how works of art and even masterpieces can be born from the application of a cerebral and artificial compositional method (such as Berg's Wozzeck and violin concerto or Schoenberg's variations for orchestra).

Besides, what is so "natural," for example, about the contrapuntal artifices dear to Bach? And yet, The Art of Fugue or the Goldberg Variations are beautiful!

And equal temperament, isn't it an artificial distortion of scales made with true harmonics?

Un compositore che ne è stato sicuramente influenzato, l'avevo già segnalato:

Andrea Di Paolo - L'AZUR for Soprano and Piano (Radio France)

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... e continua a piacermi molto 😉

It's true! We are a century away from the birth of the Second Viennese School... and it still seems difficult to listen to!!!!!! The fact is that the twentieth century is difficult to accept because, in my opinion, it expresses the confusion of our contemporary world, a confusion that persists and is transforming into exasperation. So perhaps it is still so difficult for us. Twelve-tone music represents the definitive death of the tonal system. Hierarchies and "monarchies" fall from the beginning of the 1900s, Newton's laws, the tonal system....etc. Bewilderment. Music was the last to lose its "shame," its "fear" of this impact of changes. It was not like that for Painting, for Dance, for Photography, or for literary Style. Don't you think?

pianoexpert wrote:

We are a century away from the birth of the Viennese school... and it still seems difficult to listen to!!!!!!

... you won't believe it, but that music is now "classicism".

I gladly re-listened to the two works and you can tell that Di Paolo has a century more of music in his ears.

...twelve-tone music 😟

Easley Blackwood - 13 notes Sostenuto

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pianoexpert wrote:

The Twentieth Century is difficult to accept because

Why? And what?... it won't be a single melting pot, will it?

pianoexpert wrote:

it expresses the confusion of our contemporary world, a confusion that remains and is transforming into exasperation. Therefore perhaps it is still so difficult for us. Twelve-tone music represents the definitive death of the tonal system. Hierarchies and "monarchies" fall from the beginning of the 1900s, Newton's laws, the tonal system....etc. Bewilderment. Music was the last to lose its "shame," its "fear" of this impact of changes.

To which period are you referring?

pianoexpert wrote:

It was not like this for Painting, for Dance, for Photography, for Literary Style. Don't you think?

It seems to me, for example, that... for

il Fauvism

The movement of the “Fauves” (Wild Beasts) develops in France in the early years of the twentieth century and aims to exalt vivid/contrasting colors while rejecting perspective and space.

H. Matisse (1869-1954) is one of its most authoritative representatives, who will influence P. Picasso (1891-1973) and German Expressionism.

Pablo Picasso starts the figurative artistic current of “Cubism” in France, with the “fauve” painter G. Braque (1882-1963), which seeks space reduced to a few geometric shapes (polyhedra, cylinders, cones) at acute angles defined as “cubes”.

il Futurism

In Italy, during the exact same period, the artistic/literary movement of “Futurism” is born, which wants to project itself toward the future and break radically with the past. Its founder, Filippo Tomaso Marinetti (1876-1944), publishes the movement's “Manifesto” in Paris in 1909, where he sets out his convictions by exalting the dynamism of modern life (the machine, war, the affirmation of individuality). In literature, it proposes the abolition of syntax, punctuation, and parts of speech (adjectives, adverbs, etc.). The new theories are extended to theater and music with “The Manifesto of Futurist Musicians” (Milan, 1910), signed by Francesco Balilla Pratella (1880-1955), and the Futurists criticize melodrama, conservative critics, and academic environments. In the document “The Art of Noises” (Milan, 1913), signed by the painter Luigi Russolo, it proposes expanding the field of sounds that nature provides with those reproduced by machines (trams, internal combustion engines, etc.) and, with the invention of the “intonarumori” [noise intoners], an instrument that mechanically reproduces various types of tuned noises, new avant-garde performances are proposed.

If you want, we could continue with Dadaism, Surrealism, Expressionism, but it is important to say that Nazism would liquidate all these movements by defining them as “degenerate art” and forcing their exponents to emigrate.

I renew the question: to which music are you referring... the ferment to which (perhaps) you refer is transversal across the different arts, and often music arrived "after."

Eagle wrote:

As I once wrote, twelve-tone music is proof of how and how from the application of a cerebral and artificial compositional method, works of art and even masterpieces can be born (such as Berg's Wozzeck and violin concerto or Schoenberg's variations for orchestra).

Besides, what is so "natural," for example, in the contrapuntal artifices dear to Bach? And yet, The Art of Fugue or the Goldberg Variations are beautiful!

And equal temperament, isn't it an artificial distortion of scales made with true harmonics?

True 😉

Frank wrote:

... you won't believe it, but that music is already "classicism".

In what sense "classicism"?

Perhaps in the sense that with the advent of modern electronic music and the technology at its service, that music is now "old-fashioned" (in a broad sense, obviously 😆)...

I was skimming through some old topics, incredible, a century ... who would have ever thought?

I am reporting this writing by Antonio Curcio, for those interested in the piece

http://www.wanderer.it/prese_pierrot.html

Probably Arnold Schoenberg's (1874-1951) most famous work, written in 1912 at the conclusion of the first phase of his compositional career. Schoenberg's early compositions date back to the turn of the century, with works of late-Romantic ancestry but already moving in quite new directions, thanks to formal and structural forcings that would lead on one hand to atonality (which in turn was the precursor to the dodecaphonic era that would begin about a decade later), and on the other to expressionism in music. It should be remembered that the Schoenberg of those years underwent various artistic and cultural experiences that led him to formulate, in an important essay titled "Relationship with the Text," the aesthetic principles of "musical expressionism," claiming the priority of the "expressive" essence of music over the mere literary content of the text. Pierrot Lunaire responds precisely to such a vision; indeed, in the Introduction to the score, Schoenberg is quite explicit: "The performers do not have the task here of deriving the spirit and character of the individual pieces from the meaning of the words, but exclusively from the music. What the author has deemed important in the pictorial-sonorous representation of the events and feelings contained in the text lies in the music."

It was the cabaret singer Alberine Zehme who asked Schoenberg for a song cycle in that style. The musician turns to a series of poems by a Belgian symbolist poet, Albert Giraud, which about twenty years earlier had been translated into German by O.E. Hartleben, who however had covered them with a patina of crude realism. The selection made by Schoenberg (21 texts chosen from the original 50) does not reveal an organic story; rather, we are presented with a series of episodes disconnected from one another, whose protagonist is a Pierrot wandering aimlessly through the night, alternating lyrical visions with nightmare images, often crude and violent, dreamlike moments with moments of madness and delirium. Some images return incessantly in the text, frequent and almost obsessive: the moon, darkness, pain, blood... but also sacred images, which in Pierrot's eyes also take on a blasphemous character.

The work is therefore composed of 21 short pieces, all with the same structure (three quatrains, the last of which has an added verse that repeats the initial one). The formal structure of the music, a conscious deformation and stylization of the cabaret genre, varies from piece to piece when superimposed. Pierrot's reciting voice (Sprechstimme) tells, in the first or third person, his hallucinated visions, resting on a highly refined orchestration provided by a chamber ensemble composed of piano, flute (or piccolo), clarinet (or bass clarinet), violin (or viola), and cello. These instruments are used, from time to time, in the most diverse combinations, offering a splendid timbral and coloristic counterpoint in which the protagonist's delirious visions are reflected. Frequent are the moments of "solo" by one of the instruments, which make the nocturnal atmospheres of the work even more tense and polished.

But perhaps the most peculiar element of Pierrot Lunaire is precisely that concerning the singing: with this work, in fact, the term Sprechgesang ("spoken song") was coined to indicate precisely a vocal interpretation that lies halfway between singing and recitation. Schoenberg conceives a singing style that observes the pitch of the notes but, once reached, lets it fall without fully intonating it. In the aforementioned Introduction to the work, the composer was very rigorous in this regard: "The melody marked with notes in the Sprechstimme is not intended (except for single exceptions, which are otherwise indicated) to be sung. The performer has the task of managing the change of pitches indicated by a 'spoken melody' (Sprechmelodie). This occurs provided that he observes the rhythm very scrupulously, as if he were singing, that is, with no more freedom than one might allow oneself in front of a melody to be sung; making himself aware of the difference between 'spoken sound' and 'sung sound': the sung sound keeps its pitch unchanged, while the spoken sound does indeed take the pitch of the note, but abandons it immediately by descending or ascending."
It is obvious that Schoenberg resorts to this unprecedented mode of declamation to accentuate the hallucinated and non-realistic, deliberately estranging traits of Pierrot: it is upheaval, deformation, grotesque exaggeration; it is, in the final analysis, "expressionism" in music, an expression of the discomfort and anxiety, of the alienation and fears of modern man who is losing his subjectivity, unheard in the face of the moral collapse of a world now close to

to plunge into the tragedy of war.

Antonio Curcio

Very innovative work, more than a century has already passed... truly true!